The present invention relates to a method for validating a translation of a graphical workflow of activities into an arbitrary, but structured language.
In the world of process automation and monitoring standard automation systems for controlling the widest conceivable variety of machines and plants are state of the art. Such technology covers a broad range of products which are offered by the Siemens Corp. under its SIMATIC® product family. An extensive line of products for solving the technical tasks in question such as counting, measuring, positioning, motion control, closed-loop control and cam control enhance the performance capabilities of appropriate process controllers. A variety of configurations enable the implementation of flexible machine concepts.
In this context a broad range of IT solutions exist to connect the actual hardware close to the technical and/or logistical process to the application layer of the client driving the installation. Manufacturing execution systems have therefore been developed to meet all of the requirements of a service oriented architecture (SOA) to integrate seamless into a totally integrated automation (TIA). A plug & play architecture, in which individual functions can be easily combined and configured with each other thereby forms the basis for this success.
These demands very often require in the backbone rather complicated and sophisticated software solutions which enable the approach of totally integrated automation. In view of this, the software engineers very often create a new software by means of a high level graphical language which identifies the workflow of activities within the software. Subsequently, this string/term of high level graphical language has to be translated into a client based software language executable on the machine language level. This translation requires tremendous efforts in programming and need serious testing to check whether the translated program behaves the same as the original string/term of the high level graphical language.